Ftelias – Monday 24 September 2018

We had a slow morning waiting for all the boats to leave.  The restaurant where we had dinner offered to sell us fresh bread in the morning so we went up there at 9am and bought bread and downloaded our newspapers.  We then had a late breakfast and were just hanging around for everyone to leave.  By 11am it was all go.  In fact the four boats in front of us all went at once making our leaving our berth really easy.

Richard had identified a final anchorage for us to stay our last night out.  It was said to nestle just next to the Albanian border. It was only 9 miles away and we therefore arrived at about 1pm having motored all the way in no wind.

It is a strange place. It is another one of these sea inlets in the coastline.  Most of it is taken up by three or four huge fish farms.  At the end there is a bit of a dog leg where we put the anchor down.  It is a muddy bottom and we seem to be stuck in well.  Our wonderful walkie-talkies have run out of battery!  We have more batteries but for one anchoring doesn’t seem worth putting them in.  We managed fine without them.

Richard said we wouldn’t find anyone else here and he was almost right.  There was no one here when we arrived.  About and hour later another boat anchored some way away, but left soon afterwards so we are on our own except for a house across the way and a barking dog.  There is also a lot of bird life.  We even saw several herons on the way in.  There is one brightly coloured blue bird, but we haven’t got a good enough look to identify it.  It seems too small for a kingfisher.

The night is so still it is very warm.  Not a breath of air.  I am reluctant to turn the fans on because the charge on the batteries is fairly low even though after motoring here and with the solar panels it was over 13 volts.  We must have that looked at.

We won’t be able to post this until we get to Gouvia tomorrow because there is no 4G cover here.